Scopus, Spinoza and the Arts & Humanities

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified)

on Mon, 03/17/2014 - 13:21

Increasingly people are aware that Scopus is by far the largest scholarly database for the humanities. Out of 8,000 active journals and book series titles in the social sciences 2,600 are in Arts & Humanities. Next to that our books expansion program is beginning to show impressive numbers with thousands of monographs also being indexed in Scopus.

But perhaps less well known is that the influence of Arts & Humanities is also noticeable in other fields. Let’s have a look at this and take as case in point the works of Benedict de Spinoza, who was born almost four hundred years ago actually not that far from our office here in Amsterdam. He wrote on many philosophical topics such as politics and psychology and has been credited for pre-empting the Enlightenment . He even wrote on the concept of “scopus” (an intended goal)! Einstein once said that if he believed in a god it would be the god of Spinoza.

If you search for Spinoza in Scopus you will get an impressive list of records: 219 in the last 10 years. As you would expect a large part of these are in Arts & Humanities, but also more than a few, and certainly not the least interesting ones, are in other fields, like psychology, medicine, business and computer science. And in turn these 219 articles are relying on 897 references. If you analyze these results further you’ll find that some of the great authors of the 20th century are represented: Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser. Latour, Negri, even Kafka. Why don’t you check out your own favorite philosopher in Scopus yourself? You can even set up alerts to be notified of future mentions.